a male relative and becomes pregnant. What befalls her next is said to be a fate of village children all across Egypt, and what strikes readers as starkly morose is the avenger of the family’s honor. El Saadawi never strays in her writing from the insistence that dichotomies merge. Critics tend to offer sociological responses to her works as opposed to literary ones. That is, the problems and issues she portrays are lifted to the level of sociology for any number of reasons. Yet exploration of her craft, her art in fiction writing, suffers principally because her works (though published in English and made more accessible) are not formulaically Western in outlook. El Saadawi’s dreamlike accounts, square-bodied men, disdain for ministries, and penchant for combining fiction with fact, the urban with the rural, science with art, and the rational with the nonrational, among other disparate combinations, are her hallmarks. Her works are born in Arabic and necessarily bear something of the cultural impulses and cosmology inherent in the language. The recent reissuing of her novels provides the perfect opportunity to merge the seemingly disparate forces in her art. Adele Newson-Horst Morgan State University Alawiya Sobh. Maryam: Keeper of Stories. Trans. Nirvana Tanoukhi. Chicago. Seagull Books (University of Chicago Press, distr.). 2016. 265 pages. Maryam: Keeper of Stories is a novel depicting women’s experiences during the Lebanese civil war across class, sect, and generation. It raises complex questions of memory and identity and contains beautiful observations of the essence of conflict and violence and people’s struggles with the cruelties of politics and of one another. In this novel, memories are in danger of erasure as the narrator, Maryam, struggles to rescue them: “All smells disappear, following those who create them. But the scent of memories remains, and disappears only with the flight of its author. I recount these memories so the scent will stay right here.” The novel is finely rendered, nostalgic , and resilient. Maryam makes no excuse for her “dream” to leave Lebanon and, once abroad, her desire to return. She remembers her friends and recounts their experiences together during the war. There is no anger articulated, only acceptance and sadness, no matter the scale. Alawiya Sobh is an author of remarkable skill and range. She elegantly strings together a love for writing and incisive observations of society’s restrictions on women. The stories told inside this novel traverse an equally diverse range of topics from love, female friendship, loss, and survival . Sobh’s language effortlessly delivers and engages the reader in the varied emotions carried by these topics as it billows and patters and spirals just like the country she describes. Sobh creates a snapshot of the Lebanese civil war and of the world at the time, as seen through the eyes of women. The focus here is not on plot or on characters; memories, place, and time are what is at stake: “The war silenced me, I invented Maryam to tell the story for me.” These recounted memories provide emotional resonance as the novel plumbs the depths of human experience and interrogates our beliefs and faiths. Nirvana Tanoukhi has translated the Arabic novel into an equally gentle read in English. The skilled translation enables the reader to slip into the stories easily, and the close observations and simple directness are very hospitable. This daring, vibrant, and colorful work engages the viewer intellectually as well as emotionally with each chapter, and Tanoukhi’s bravery in choosing to undertake this beautiful and delicate work of Arabic literature will forever be admired and appreciated. Nicole Fares University of Arkansas Yoko Tawada. Memoirs of a Polar Bear. Trans. Susan Bernofsky. New York. New Directions. 2016. 288 pages. As acrobatic with her writing as her polar bear subjects, Yoko Tawada walks a line between fantastical yet believable. Her novel Memoirs of a Polar Bear is her circus showcasing this amazing feat of balance. The author fills the audience with expectations and then fulfills them in unexpected World Literature in Review 82 WLT NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2016 ways. While the bears are celebrated, it is not for their acquired ability to navigate human society, for this seems somewhat commonplace...